California state Sen. Scott Wiener, the progressive frontrunner to win Nancy Pelosi's congressional seat, is under fire after amendments to a bill meant to keep convicted sex offenders out of elected office quietly carved out exceptions for certain sex acts involving minors. Conservative groups confronted Wiener at a legislative hearing, demanding to know why crimes against children were being excluded from the bill's reach.
The bill in question, AB 2691, was introduced this year to block anyone convicted of felony sexual assault or human trafficking from holding elected office in California. The legislation gained momentum after a Fresno child sex offender named Rene Campost attempted to run for city council, a case that laid bare the absence of any state law preventing convicted predators from seeking public office.
But as the New York Post reported, the bill was amended while it sat in the state senate elections committee, chaired by Wiener, to exclude violations of three California Penal Code sections covering sodomy, oral sex, and sexual penetration with a minor from the definition of "sexual assault." Those same excluded statutes provide that any person over 21 who commits such an act with someone under 16 faces automatic felony charges. In other words, the very felonies the bill was designed to cover were stripped from its scope.
Greg Burt, vice president of the California Family Council, testified at the hearing and did not hide his disbelief. He told lawmakers:
"Our honest reaction was that it could not be real. We assume we've misread it. We sat in our office and tried to imagine how anyone could stand up and defend it."
Burt pressed the committee directly on the changes.
"So I'm here today generally hoping someone will tell us why crimes against children are being carved out of this bill."
David Bolog, representing the Serving Family Values Alliance, echoed that frustration. His organization had initially supported AB 2691 in its original form. The amendments forced them to reverse course.
"It is now in contradiction with what it seems to be the intent of the author. I'm baffled with this current legislation."
Bolog added that the exemptions were indefensible given the bill's original purpose.
"I don't know how anybody thinks these exceptions, these exemptions, would be acceptable with its prior intentions."
Wiener, who is gay and a vocal advocate for LGBTQ rights, offered a two-part defense at the hearing. First, he attacked California's sex offender registry as overbroad and historically discriminatory toward gay men. He told the committee:
"It's hard to overstate how extreme and broken the California sex offender registry was."
He continued with a historical comparison:
"Whether you were a sexually violent predator or whether you were a gay guy who had sex in a park or in a car and got arrested, like for example Bayard Rustin did...you were on for life."
Rustin was a gay civil rights leader arrested in California decades ago. Wiener's invocation of his name was plainly intended to frame the registry debate as one of civil rights, a framing that critics at the hearing did not accept as relevant to the question of whether convicted child sex offenders should be allowed to run for office.
Wiener also insisted that the amendments removed only misdemeanor-level offenses from the bill's coverage, not felonies. He stated at the hearing: "There were no felonies in any of the amendments removed out, no felonies."
His office offered a more specific rationale to The California Post, saying the exceptions were made to account for young adults who were only recently minors from being unfairly punished. The original version, his office argued, "could have swept in an 18 year old who had sex with a 17 year old partner."
The Romeo-and-Juliet framing may sound reasonable in isolation. But the excluded penal code sections do not apply only to teenagers close in age. Those same statutes specify that any person over 21 who commits the covered acts with someone under 16 is automatically guilty of a felony. The carveouts, as written, exclude all violations of those statutes, not just the narrow consensual-teen scenario Wiener described.
That gap is what alarmed Burt, Bolog, and others who testified. The bill's original intent was straightforward: keep people convicted of serious sex crimes away from public office. The amendments introduced ambiguity precisely where clarity mattered most, in the treatment of crimes against children.
Under standard legislative procedure in California, committee chairs typically request changes to bills under their committee's supervision. Wiener's office confirmed that his elections committee worked with the bill's unnamed author on the amendments. That makes Wiener the central figure in the decision to narrow the bill's scope, regardless of who technically drafted the language.
The California Republican Party wasted no time. In a June 30, 2026 post on X, the party's official account wrote: "Not shocking: @Scott_Wiener wants registered sex offenders to be allowed to serve in elected office." The characterization is the CAGOP's own, but the underlying legislative record speaks plainly enough.
Wiener's involvement did not stop with AB 2691. At the same hearing, he expressed opposition to AB 2753, a separate bill that would have barred registered sex offenders from seeking office. That measure failed to pass, though it may be reconsidered. Between the two bills, California lawmakers introduced this year to try to ban sex offenders from office, neither has advanced, and Wiener played a role in stalling both.
The broader pattern is worth noting. California's progressive political class has faced a string of controversies involving potential legal and political jeopardy that would embarrass any party willing to be embarrassed.
Wiener is not a backbencher. He is described as the progressive frontrunner to win Pelosi's congressional seat, a launching pad to national influence. His record on sex-offense legislation has drawn scrutiny before, and his willingness to invoke civil rights language to defend narrowing protections for children fits a pattern that voters in his prospective district deserve to examine closely.
The case also arrives amid a broader season of Democratic officials facing criminal and ethical scrutiny across the country. Whether it is elected officials caught in federal probes or candidates whose records collapse under examination, the party's bench has shown persistent cracks that leadership seems content to ignore.
Several questions hang over this episode. The author of AB 2691 has not been publicly named in connection with the amendments, leaving it unclear who initiated the changes and who approved them. The specific penal code section numbers excluded by the amendments have not been publicly detailed in full. And the current status of AB 2691 after the hearing, whether it was passed, tabled, or sent back for further revision, remains unreported.
Wiener's claim that "no felonies" were removed deserves particular scrutiny. The excluded statutes themselves contain felony provisions for adults over 21 who commit the covered acts with minors under 16. If the carveouts apply to the statutes broadly, then the felony provisions within those statutes are excluded too. That is not a technicality. It is the heart of the dispute.
The hearing also raised a question that no one in Sacramento seems eager to answer: if the goal of AB 2691 was to keep convicted sex offenders out of office, why did the amendments make it easier for some of them to qualify? Wiener's office says the concern was fairness to young adults in consensual relationships. Critics say the language goes far beyond that scenario. The text of the bill, available on the legislature's website, is the only honest referee.
Meanwhile, the political dimension is impossible to miss. Wiener is running for Congress in a district that will reward progressive credentials. His advocacy for LGBTQ rights is well known. But the question voters face is not whether the sex offender registry has historical flaws, it is whether a lawmaker seeking higher office should be in the business of softening consequences for crimes against children on his way up the ladder.
That is not a question about civil rights. It is a question about priorities, and about what a politician is willing to defend when the cameras are on.
AB 2691 started as something most Californians would have supported without hesitation: a law saying that if you are convicted of felony sexual assault or human trafficking, you cannot hold elected office. The Fresno case of Rene Campost, a child sex offender who tried to run for city council, made the need obvious. A second bill, AB 2753, aimed at the same problem from a different angle by targeting registered sex offenders directly.
Both efforts have now stalled. One was amended into something its own supporters could no longer endorse. The other failed at the hearing where Wiener spoke against it. The net result: California still has no law preventing convicted sex offenders from running for office. And the man most responsible for that outcome is a progressive Democrat asking voters to send him to Washington.
When a bill designed to protect children from predators in public office gets gutted in committee, and the committee chair's defense amounts to registry reform and hypothetical teenagers, voters are entitled to ask a simple question: whose side are you on?